Well he has possibly destroyed the Republican party in national politics for the foreseeable future by legislating from the middle forcing Republicans who had a preconceived plan of obstruction to become fugging idiots by moving their party to the extreme right, hid in a conservative bubble detached from reality, spit on Ronald Reagan's legacy, and become what Bobby Jindal called "the stupid party"

I thought that Marco Rubio might have a chance in 2016 but now that he has put his name on immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship he has pretty much forfeited the Republican presidential primary.

The only reason Republicans are even relevant at this point is because of gerrymandering in Congress allowing them to lose the overall vote by over a million votes but somehow keeping a majority. Then acting like that gives them a mandate.

Now the Republican Party, fresh out of ideas and having destroyed their own party are trying to come of with new voter suppression ideas and election gimmicks (see what they tried to do in Virginia that is so outrageous a lot of Republicans even oppose it including the Governor of Virginia) to try and become relevant again instead of doing what is supposed to happen when your party is destroyed which is to mainstream your positions.

Obama has Jedi mind tricked the fug out of Republicans and they still don't get it.

while republicans are p dumb and it's great to see their party burn to the ground thanks to their weird far right ideology and changing demographics, obama has for the most part convinced a sizable portion of americans that his 90s republican platform (as you called it, "the middle") is now somehow socialist. the overton window has shifted and we're worse off for it.

i will say that, and i've seen this point made multiple times before, one good thing to come from this is that dumb old conservatives keep calling things like universal healthcare and education "socialism" and it's actually pushing some young voters toward the left because they've never faced a propaganda campaign quite like either red scare

i agree with your summation though. the repubs have been using "extreme leftist" and "socialist" as buzzwords to trigger reactions for so long that when a moderate steps into place they're forced to take it to an even more polarizing extreme, and an increasingly relevant demographic of people are seeing through it.

i still say this is the southern strategy returning to bite the GOP square in the ass

i agree with your summation though. the repubs have been using "extreme leftist" and "socialist" as buzzwords to trigger reactions for so long that when a moderate steps into place they're forced to take it to an even more polarizing extreme, and an increasingly relevant demographic of people are seeing through it.

i still say this is the southern strategy returning to bite the GOP square in the ass

first let me say that platform may not have been the best choice of words; he does tend to say things that aren't totally shitty, and his campaigns (primarily the first) reached quite a few disaffected leftists. the problem is, his policy decisions have been p bad. i'm not really concerned with whether or not he has lied or has simply struggled to negotiate with the loons in the GOP. the fact is, his policy decisions show that he has governed as a "moderate republican"

the individual mandate (the key component of obama's hitler communist care) was championed by the heritage foundation in the 90s, and was the most visible/popular response to the clinton proposal. it is to the right of both the public option and single payer, neither of which obama seemed to give a poo about (unlike much of the rest of the developed world)

see here:

Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. “We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance,” he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans — including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office — had signed one individual mandate bill or another.

obama cut taxes by first extending the bush tax cuts, then making 82% of the tax cuts permanent; as a reminder, the marginal rates are quite a bit lower than the clinton-era rates (http://www.cbpp.org/...fa=view&id=3880)

newt gingrich and george h.w. bush both supported cap and trade

see here:

President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was “more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past,” he said. The plan passed easily, with “aye” votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that “if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur . . . it’s something I would strongly support.”

As Gingrich’s quote suggests, cap and trade didn’t just have Republican support in the 1990s. John McCain included a cap-and-trade plan in his 2008 platform. The same goes for an individual mandate, which Grassley endorsed in June 2009 — mere months before he began calling the policy “unconstitutional.”

he's not totally shitty (DADT, lily ledbetter) but uhhh he's p bad. don't even glance at his economic team if you (rightfully) believe that wall street is the scum of the earth

see here:

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.Then he got elected.

while republicans are p dumb and it's great to see their party burn to the ground thanks to their weird far right ideology and changing demographics, obama has for the most part convinced a sizable portion of americans that his 90s republican platform (as you called it, "the middle") is now somehow socialist. the overton window has shifted and we're worse off for it.

i will say that, and i've seen this point made multiple times before, one good thing to come from this is that dumb old conservatives keep calling things like universal healthcare and education "socialism" and it's actually pushing some young voters toward the left because they've never faced a propaganda campaign quite like either red scare

I was a Republican in the 90's so that is probably why I like his policies. And you are right, he has governed as a moderate republican.

It is funny you said that, because if I defend Obama my friends are like "When did you become so liberal?" And I have to tell them "I didn't, his policies aren't liberal. A lot of them are Republican ideas." As you illustrated in your other post.

Also, not only was a mandate backed by the heritage foundation, but the template for Obamacare (and Romneycare) was also the Senate republican's counter-proposal for Clinton's health care plan in the 90's. Which is one of the reasons Bob Dole came out in support of Obamacare.

i give the reps more blame for shooting themselves in the foot as much as Team Obama has pulled a fast one on them.

the reps are so far out of the game and they don't do themselves any favors with what they say and do.

and for our resident political guru, i have never once called or alluded that O was a socialist. i have hardly been critical of him here in his first 4 yrs.

but why do i bother ever sharing my opinions here is beyond me. i

Don't blame the reps. It was an orchestrated move by the Republican leadership in 2008 to actively obstruct the President. The thinking was that they could paint Obama as a failure in one of his major campaign promises. To be bipartisan. They figured that by opposing anything the President suggested they could run their campaign against him as being a failure, liberal extremist, and a divisive president instead of a bipartisan centrist.

Now whether it was a deft move by Obama or a desire to live up to that pledge, Obama called their bluff. And by presenting ideas that the Republicans had supported in the past he forced them to move further to the right or actually get things done. They chose the former and moved further to the right and entities like Fox News went right along with them.

Don't look now, but he is doing it with gun control legislation. More stringent and universal background checks is something that the NRA has supported in the past (and is almost universally supported by the people according to recent polls). The ban on assault weapons is something that Ronald Reagan supported. But what has happened? The NRA (who doesn't care about gun laws, it is just a Conservative propaganda machine) has decided that they no longer support universal background checks and the Republican party has continued their march away from Reagan (even though they mention him as much as possible, today Reagan would be considered a RINO) by opposing the ban of assault weapons.

Don't blame the reps. Blame leadership and Fox News. They are the main culprits here.

I was a Republican in the 90's so that is probably why I like his policies. And you are right, he has governed as a moderate republican.

It is funny you said that, because if I defend Obama my friends are like "When did you become so liberal?" And I have to tell them "I didn't, his policies aren't liberal. A lot of them are Republican ideas." As you illustrated in your other post.

Also, not only was a mandate backed by the heritage foundation, but the template for Obamacare (and Romneycare) was also the Senate republican's counter-proposal for Clinton's health care plan in the 90's. Which is one of the reasons Bob Dole came out in support of Obamacare.

When your party moves so far to the right of course you find yourself being called liberal for being a Reagan/GHWB Republican or a Democrat